Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Online dinosaurs never go extinct -- instead, they thrive, jostling with their descendants for our attention.
Jan 19, 2001 | You sit down at your computer, preparing to feed your addiction. You log onto the system, enter your name and password and begin. Your dull life as Joe Student is left behind; you are now Throg, Mighty Dwarf Warrior and you're determined to make 12th level before you log out -- provided that luck and caffeine hold out. You're tempted to use some tricks you know, some holes in the game system, to do it easily, but you resist temptation and play the hard way. Your one fear is running into some player-killing asshole who will try to take you down, probably using some system exploit. (They always cheat, of course -- how else do they win so often?)
Quick question: What year is this? 1980 or 2000? If I told you that you were feverishly typing commands away at a Telnet prompt, would that be a dead giveaway?
Well ... not really.
While you might not know it from the gaming magazines, old-style Telnet MUD (the role-player games known as "multi-user dungeons"; see also MUSH, MUX, MOO etc., ad infinitum) is alive and well semi-underground, still hacking and slashing (and occasionally sexing) after all these years. Discovering this can be like kicking at the mud by the seashore and having a trilobite wriggle out: We've all seen the fossils. Aren't these things extinct?
Given that a "classic" game today is one that came out last year, and a relic of times past is one that is two years old, the longevity of some of these worlds is staggering -- DragonMud has been active since 1989, an eon in computer years. To put this into perspective, consider that the game had been running for four years when the World Wide Web came into existence in 1993; 317 characters created in that year are still active.
A player experienced in modern MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games, which are really just graphic versions of the old MUDs) might be confused, at first, by the lack of visuals and the fact that playing text-only MUDs requires the ability to read and write, but not a credit card. But pretty soon, the newbie would find almost exactly the same gaming structures both within the game (the skill levels, monsters and other characters) and in the surrounding game culture of player alliances, politics, "gods" and "wizards" (experienced players with greater privileges in the game world).
Abbreviations and slang cross the boundaries of time and code. Players in Everquest, for example, refer to monsters by the ancient term "mobs," derived from "mobiles," the name for objects in multiuser games that are, well, mobile -- moving from room to room, pursuing players. Likewise, the tradition of player killing (in which players attack other players' characters, rather than computer-controlled game entities) continues to thrive, as does the controversy around it.
The Internet is occasionally seen as a stratified system, layered like the face of a cliff. According to this analogy, new technologies bury the older methods, rendering them obsolete, relevant only to those Net archaeologists who dig beneath the surface. It's a useful analogy, but incorrect. A far better model for the accretion of new online subcultures and technologies is the human brain itself.
Like the surface of the Earth, the human mind is built in layers, new on top of old. But while the strata laid in the Cambrian do not continue to writhe and breed, and there are no dinosaurs still crawling around in Cretaceous rock, the oldest parts of the mind are not only alive but active, shaping the behavior of the upper layers in weird and wondrous ways. Some theorists who study the evolution of the human brain believe that in order to understand the human drive to build atomic bombs, to philosophize and make art, we must consider the role of the hindbrain, the primitive mind that, the theory goes, understands only territory, mating and power.
Similarly, to understand why Everquest and Ultima Online and the rest are the way they are, we must look back to the earliest MUDs and see how they bred cultures and conflicts that still exist today. It's a principle that applies to other aspects of Internet culture as well: The look of online art, the ways Internet users communicate with each other and the language in which they do it all have roots in the oldest Net cultures. But what's truly amazing is that those oldest, primordial Net cultures still exist. The history of the Net is alive and well.
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